We've got a whole pool of sysadmins on this list. How do you deal with these
issues in your current environments?

Across a pool of web servers in a cluster, we use rsync over SSH to
keep content "in sync". When changes are made on the "master", it
takes a few moments for the other nodes to get the changes, but that
hasn't caused any issues. rsync is initiated on the "non-master"
nodes and the only time we have a problem is if the "master" isn't
available (down for reboot, etc.) -- even that doesn't cause any real
problems, just results in an e-mail since the script called from
crontab generates output in the event of errors; otherwise, it's
silent.

We're very happy with this method, it has proven to be reliable and
scalable in our environment.